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in operation, not an unsound and dis- eased one. She had intelligence, not perverted intelligence. She reasoned, and it was the reasoning of sanity, and not of insanity. The evidence at the trial strongly tended to show the petition- er guilty of murder by the willful, de- liberate, and premeditated killing of her husband, and on a careful consider- ation of the evidence adduced in sup- port of the petitioner it is not, in our judgment, of sufficient force to change the result were a new trial granted.74


Before workmen’s (now worker’s) com- pensation laws were enacted in Vermont in 1917, following the 1913 constitution- al amendments authorizing such legisla- tion, the decisions of the Vermont Supreme Court rarely favored the employee. A rail- road worker was run over by a train. His re- covery was denied at trial, and sustained on appeal, because it was his duty to “keep a lookout for approaching cars, and to be out of the way of the same.”75


An engineer


set off a “torpedo,” just to see the section man jump, which injured him, and the rail- road escaped liability since they never or- dered the engineer to harass the man.76


In


Conroy’s Adm’x v. Nelson (1912), Watson wrote,


However great the moral obligation resting on the foreman to warn the plaintiff, his fellow laborer, he did not, in his neglect to do so, represent the defendant, for the master’s duty had been fully performed. The omission of the foreman in this behalf, like his omis- sion to make use of the shoring, was his own, and not that of the master, an omission which comes within the fellow servant rule.77


The lack of compassion, embedded in


the law, extended beyond the problem of the fellow servant rule. A hard-of-hearing traveler’s injuries are unrecoverable. It was his duty to be extra vigilant with that dis- ability.78


fire in a jail were denied damages, as keep- ing a jail is a governmental power.79


The heirs of a prisoner killed in a All of


these, including the railroad worker cases, were decisions signed by Watson. There is one exception in all of the de- cisions to the tone of stoic solemnity. It comes in a 1920 decision in Dyer v. Lalor. Anna Dyer expected to marry Charles Lalor. He had proposed in 1901, and reaffirmed it in 1916 and 1918, but that year he mar- ried another, and Anna sued him for breach of promise. The jury awarded her $20,000. In his longest written decision, Chief Justice Watson wrote this of Anna’s situation: “The contract is broken; fond hope, so long and ardently cherished, has been forever dissi- pated, and the advantages she might rea-


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sonably have anticipated are forever lost to her.” She “was then thirty-nine years old; she had waited from girlhood to middle age, possibly sacrificing the hope of a fam- ily for the wealth he was to accumulate.”80 John H. Watson revealed himself in this rare instance as a man with a heart. Even in his last years, as he reached sev- enty-eight, Watson’s mind remained sharp and precise.81


Then, after writing his last de-


cision, he was gone. Five reported cases ex- plained that while he had sat on argument on them, they were decided without him. The contributions of John H. Watson to the jurisprudence of Vermont from his re- ported decisions, and through the strength of his character, are far more important that the length of his service to the state. Years alone do not explain the remarkable lega- cy of the products of his mind. As all chief justices do, Watson came to embody the law itself. He was not imperious, nor was he anything less than serious. He may not have thought of his service at Vershire very often, but it left an imprint in his work. He took the hard way, and he did his duty, and the State was in good hands because of his convic- tions and his diligence. The mettle he had displayed at Vershire in 1883 remained vis- ible throughout his life. ____________________ Paul S. Gillies, Esq., is a partner in the Montpelier firm of Tarrant, Gillies, Merri- man & Richardson and is a regular contribu- tor to the Vermont Bar Journal.


____________________ 1


Id. at 853.


ALBERT D. HAGER, 2 REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY OF VERMONT: DESCRIPTIVE, THEORETICAL, ECONOMICAL, AND


SCENOGRAPHICAL 852 (1861). 2


3


There was an accident at the mine in March of 1883. A wire rope holding the ore cars broke, and an empty car shot down into the mine, in- juring two men. VT. WATCHMAN & STATE JOURNAL,


March 21, 1883, col. F. 4


The mines were successful until “the veins carrying the ore began to narrow and become pinched and instead of there being a prof- it there was a loss of several thousand dollars per month.” VT. WATCHMAN & STATE JOURNAL, May 23, 1883, col. E; LAWS OF 1878, No. 211; Laws of


col. F. 5


1882, No. 214. 6


col. E. 7


col. F. 8


VT .WATCHMAN & STATE JOURNAL, Aug. 16, 1882, VT .WATCHMAN & STATE JOURNAL, Sept. 27, 1882, VT. WATCHMAN & STATE JOURNAL, Dec. 6, 1882,


col. G. 9


col. D. 10


VT. WATCHMAN & STATE JOURNAL, Feb. 14, 1883, Trouble at the Ely Mines, VT. WATCHMAN, July


11, 1883, p. 4, col. E. 11


The first was in 1847, when disputes over the building of the Vermont Central Railroad at Bolton required military intervention. Id. When they were building the Vermont Central line through Bolton, two temporary settlements of Irish workers were established there, with three hundred inhabitants between them. George W. Kennedy wrote the history of Bolton for Abby Maria Hemenway’s Vermont Historical Gazatteer (1867) and told how discontent spread through


THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • WINTER 2012 15 VT. WATCHMAN & STATE JOURNAL, Sept. 27, 1882,


Ruminations: A Hero Once, a Judge for Life


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